I first wrote about Alexaholic on October 7, 2007, before Alexa revamped its website to run faster and provide more traffic comparison options. It looks like that on March 18, Alexa took legal action against Ron Hornbaker about the use of the name, Alexaholic. So the website came back online as the name, Statsaholic. Now it appears that Alexa is blocking the Statsaholic’s use of the API altogether.
“While blocking the hotlinking of their images is certainly within their right, in this case, they are selectively blocking just this website, because tens of thousands of other websites, and Alexa’s own free widgets, hotlink their traffic graphs in exactly the same manner as I’m doing. Just so Alexa knows, I would gladly pay a reasonable fee to serve their graph images here, but to date, they have no official API for those images,” wrote Hornbaker on the Statsaholic pages. Hornbaker is currently looking to ways to keep the website up around the system but is having a hard time getting around the API.
Before Alexa had blocked Statsaholic from using the API, visitors of the Statsaholic could embed graphs with Alexa data on their own websites. I don’t believe that this feature has yet been introduced by Alexa yet, so the company may have felt threatened that Statsaholic was using their data without receiving any compensation. However, looking at the previous statement by Hornbaker, it seems that he is prepared to offer some sort of compensation for continuous use of the data. Whether it will pan out or not is still a mystery, but we’re rooting for Hornbaker as I see Statsaholic being a website that utilizes the API quite well.
Another questionable website that went down which I covered before that had the name Alexa in it was Alexa Street which also utilized the Alexa API. Alexa Street was a game where you can buy and sell shares of website rankings based on Alexa data. If a website’s Alexa ranking dropped but was expected to rise shortly after, you clearly wanted to buy those shares and sell them again when it reaches the high point. I am not sure whether Alexa took legal action against Alexa Street though.
If you look at Alexa’s current Movers & Shakers for this week, it appears that Alexaholic is one of the Movers & Shakers that dropped in rankings the most. I think that this should be removed seeing as how Alexa is responsible for the drop.
